Yami Shibai Episode 10 Anime Review

Kids, always remember your daily intake of crickets.

This episode wasn’t so much creepy as nostalgic for me. I grew up being taken care of by my grandma, so her apartment was super old. It had a squat toilet and it was extremely dirty. There was mold growing on the rusty pipes, the lines between the tilings on the floor was black, and there were dark corners of the toilet which were impossible to clean. Spiders, cockroaches, lizards and flies were my bathing companions.

And I hated every second of it.

The three times when a person is most vulnerable is when they are eating, sleeping or on the crapper. Your body is in a relaxed state in all those times. I think… That may be why I hated to take baths. The place was so dirty and scary to me. And with the squat toilet, when you squat down… It’s hard to see the opening where the water is. And unlike a toilet bowl, the squat toilet we had, had a bigger hole. And yes, I remember once or twice, going into the toilet to find a cockroach had died in it, probably from the reflection of the light in the water or… the moon.

Even today, there’s a nagging feeling when I use the toilet. Will something come up to bite me in the ass? With the internet, there’s even more horror stories of snakes, squirrels, and even rats climbing up the water pipe and emerging in the toilet bowl.

That’s why I found the shit monster in this episode totally non-horrifying. It was just strange. Sure, one of my toilet fears is falling into the hole, but the only hole that has been big enough for that is those latrines used in the wilderness, that are hand-dug, not that squat one. The art on this creature, like the subway one, was terribly bad. I think the cricket in that screenshot was more creepy, on a basal level.

I wish the episode had shown how a bug crawled up from the toilet hole, then more and more, and as the guy tried to flush, the toilet became clog. He gives a hard tug and an avalanche of bugs come flowing out and crawling up to his legs and then his body, and maybe he got dragged down into the toilet depths, if that’s what the shit wants.